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Re: Inverted (=reflected) N

Hi:

At 08:30 PM 2/5/98 GMT, Chris Rowley wrote:

>> There are many examples of such things:

>What things?

Like the two glyph names `nabla' and `Deltainv'

>> mu	micro
>> Omega	Ohm
>> Delta	increment
>> Sigma	summation
>> Pi	product
>> middot	periodcentered

>> These correspond to the many-to-many relationship between characters and
>> glyphs.

>No they do not; they are just synonyms for glyphs.

Seems more like to me that they are pairs of character names that
correspond to the same glyph.  And the characters in each pair
clearly have different significance.

>> But there
>> are also plenty of examples where one glyph stands for more than one
>> character.

>I am not sure that glyphs "stand for" characters at all.

Are these then ~totally~ different concepts :-) There is ~no~ relation
between glyphs and characters?  Alasofoa anomn sdfbuynnf  sou?

>> Using the `not invented here' philosophy (which occurs no only in the TeX
>> world!),
>> Microsoft has consistenly used a name different from the one used by Adobe
>> when
>> there were two names.

>Two names for what?

for the same glyph, as in the short example table above.

>It would seem to me to make more sense if the names of the glyphs were
>decided by the font designer then this particular problem would not arise.

Well, they are.  Chuck Bigelow made up what he thought are reasonable
glyph names when he designed Lucida Sans Unicode.  And he certainly
qualifies as a font designer.

>But I know that you are talking about a world with fixed names (no
>synonyms allowed); but there will never be one such fixed list, so why
>not prepare for the world of multiple tables or, better, persuade the
>"not made here" worlds to support synonyms.

Not unlike trying to move the earth with a teaspoon. They do not give
a rat's ass about the TeX world, I can assure you.  Excuse the language,
but there have been several issues that I have tried to budge either
Adobe or MS on that was most frustrating and hopeless.  And I always
get amused by postings on comp.text.tex that say something like
`pressure should be brought to bear on ....'  What pressure?
We can't even get them to fix obvious bugs that would be easy to fix.
Because they affect a miniscule fringe of their user population.

>Even if we do choose to use one of the Lucida glyph name systems as
>one possible set of names for TeX or MathML mathematical entities (or
>glyphs) this will still be the choice of that user community and it
>will not get any closer to an impossible ideal of unique names.

I know: because their design is flawed, we will rather come up with our own
flawed design.  We'll end up with something that almost does the right
thing.  Not unlike 8r, which could have been LY1 and been much more 
useful.  But that would have been using something that was invented
elsewhere.

>However, this is no reason not to do it even if Lucida does misuse inv:-).

Don't mind me, I just got out of bed with the wrong foot this morning :-)

Regards, Berthold.